Word: pasts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Just in time to hit motorists at the start of the peak driving season, gasoline prices have risen about 25% in the past two months, to a U.S. average of $1.25 per gal. The pain at the pump is largely the result of higher crude- oil prices, and no relief is in sight. Members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, whose squabbling has sometimes led to price wars, were relatively cooperative with one another when they met last week in Vienna. Because of strong worldwide demand for OPEC's crude, the group decided that it could boost its self...
...next day Deng, 84, China's supreme ruler for the past decade, made his first appearance on television in nearly a month. At his side were Li and a host of top leaders and party elders, as well as representatives of all key factions in the military, including those who had been considered loyal to party moderates. Present too were President Yang Shangkun, 82, a former army general and the reputed mastermind of the Tiananmen attack, and Qiao Shi, 64, the state security chief who may become General Secretary of the Communist Party. Conspicuously missing was the incumbent in that...
...past several years the Communist Party has been facing the question of who will ultimately replace Deng. He complicated the problem by purging his own chosen heir, the reform-minded party General Secretary Hu Yaobang, who was relieved of his job in 1987 for not quickly crushing student demonstrations. Hu's replacement as designated successor was Zhao, who now appears to have also fallen victim to Deng's displeasure...
...population whose majority is under 40 years of age. The P.L.A., contrary to its popular repute, has shown itself to be the regime's, not the people's, army. Said a senior British diplomat last week: "There is not a single institution that has not been besmirched in these past weeks." The threat of civil war has not entirely vanished -- if only as a psychological rather than an actual battle. The students' calls for democracy had unparalleled national support, which may have gone underground but will not go away. Perhaps 300,000 troops are still encamped around the capital...
African elephants have been slaughtered at an alarming rate over the past decade, largely because they are the primary source of the world's ivory. Their population has dwindled from 1.3 million in 1979 to just 625,000 today, and the rate of killing has been accelerating in recent years because many of the older, bigger-tusked animals have already been destroyed. "The poachers now must kill three times as many elephants to get the same quantity of * ivory," explains Curtis Bohlen, senior vice president of the World Wildlife Fund...